alive and well in Barcelona!
First off, Happy Birthday stevenagy!!
(Wow, finding the correct punctuation on a foreign keyboard is hard!)
Am at the printing plant where we are doing the press check. There are two presses running at once, each printing a particular section of the book on one side. First they do the makeready, which is where they print test sheets and start balancing the colors (CMYK) to make the pages print properly. This is where the "press check" part comes in: the press man first balances the color, then I come along and they show me the sheets and we compare them to the proof pages from the prepress house.
This sounds so easy. And it is made infinitely easier by having really good press guys like they have here. I am in awe of the stuff they are doing.
What I learned today: Art that bleeds across a spread is really a pain in the butt to get right on press. The facing pages aren´t facing each other on the imposed pages. They may not even be on the same sheet. You need to proof both sort of simultaneously, to make sure they match just not the proof, but more importantly they match each other. Sometimes the real print strays a bit from the proof, because on press they can make it look better and possibly rebalance some color that wasn´t awesome.
Other complication is that the sheets are arranged in rows and colums, and each column is printing along on the same section of ink nozzles. So if a column of pages on the sheet have wildly varying colors--say, one page is a big yellow art, and another has a lot of blue or pink--then it´s very hard to get the color balanced so that both can print properly.
We had one sheet today where there were three spreads with each half in different columns, but they were also very different colors. It was a huge challenge to make them all match with each other and still balance the colors so they all looked good. Two on a sheet is doable, but three is like trying to solve the Three Body Problem.
Having a blast! I really do love running around in printing plants, and the people here couldn´t be nicer. They are just super; so patient and helpful.
We´re staying late today to see that everything gets done; then no need to come tomorrow. It´s a long day, but very enjoyable for me. Sometimes I´m reminded that I am in the right industry. :)